Lead poisoning and violent crime

Well, it's been way too long since I've updated this blog, but with all the furor about lead and it's potential link to violent crime lately, I thought I'd weigh in.

It's an eye-opening correlation- we know that living in poverty in urban centers is correlated with long-term vulnerabilities to diseases like diabetes and high blood pressure.  Certainly the exposure to toxins is higher, and the effects of that are still unknown.  But this article takes the research further and proposes that lead exposure early in life is directly related to violent crime.  It's a juicy hypothesis, and the kind of issue that people clamor to get behind, if for no other reason that it provides a (seemingly) simple solution to a complex problem.

But there are issues with this.  For one, correlation does not equal causation.  Other issues with the research are spelled out in this well-written piece by Scott Firestone.

Violent crime doesn't just happen when someone's frontal lobes are impaired due to toxin exposure.  And there are many other elements of life as a young black man in the inner city that contribute to the high rate of incarceration (a link made in a different Mother Jones article, here).
A quote:
Both gasoline lead and lead paint were most prevalent in the postwar era in the inner core of big cities, the former because that's where cars were densest and the latter because slumlords had little incentive to clean up old buildings. Because African-Americans were disproportionately represented in inner-city populations during the high-lead era, they were disproportionately exposed to lead as children. The result was higher rates of violent crime when black kids grew up in the 70s and 80s. 

If this furor sparks concern and outrage about toxins in the inner city poisoning our children, and if that concern and outrage is channeled into real, on the ground work to clean up those environments, great.  But let's not claim the solution to racial inequity in this country is lead reduction.  Saying that lead poisoning essentially created a hoard of brain-damaged young black children who then went on crime sprees is a step away from eugenic thinking.  Explaining away the 'fact' that black children are just a bit slower than white children due to blood poisoning, and therefore more likely to break the law ignores too many of the other aspects of life in the inner city that might contribute to crime.

Let's talk about institutionalized racism, about poverty, about stress.  Broken families.  Access to health care and quality schools.  Nutrition.  Growing up in the midst of violence.

Certainly poisoning in early childhood is an awful, awful problem that has a clear solution.  And I'm glad to see this debate shining a light on that problem.  So how about we do something about the lead problem and then move on to tackle the bigger issues?